TAMPA - Steve and Marlene Aisenberg, who became suspects when their infant daughter disappeared from their Valrico home in 1997, sued police and prosecutors Monday, alleging that their civil rights were violated during a malicious prosecution.
The couple are suing the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office and 20 people individually, including two federal prosecutors who brought charges against them.
The Aisenbergs were never charged with homicide but were charged with lying to investigators. The case against them eventually collapsed.
Their child Sabrina, who was 5 months old when she disappeared, has never been found.
Tampa attorney Barry Cohen filed the lawsuit in Hillsborough Circuit Court.
The lawsuit seeks the usual minimal legal threshold of damages in excess of $15,000, but Cohen hopes to recover much more. The lawsuit alleges fabrication of evidence, defamation and says officials sought to inflict "emotional duress" on the Aisenbergs.
Steve Cole, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office, said the office doesn't comment on pending lawsuits. The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office declined to comment as well.
During a news conference at his downtown Tampa office Monday afternoon, Cohen charged that prosecutors conspired against the Aisenbergs because they wanted to make a name for themselves in a high-profile case, and that investigators went along with their design.
The goal, Cohen said, "was to frame them and put an innocent mother and father in jail just so these prosecutors could rise to eminence ... and become celebrities in their own right."
The case against the Aisenbergs crumbled in 2001 after a federal magistrate judge questioned the government's evidence and the way law enforcement officials went about collecting it.
The lawsuit alleges prosecutors presented "patently false and misleading evidence" to a judge so they could get a wiretap approved for the Aisenbergs' residence.
Furthermore, transcripts that authorities made of the wiretap recordings were "intentionally or recklessly" false, the lawsuit said, because the tapes were largely inaudible.
Among other accusations, the lawsuit states that officials made "unfounded allegations of abuse" of the two remaining Aisenberg children.
Those named in the lawsuit include federal prosecutors Stephen Kunz and Rachelle Desvaux Bedke.
Also named were Sheriff Cal Henderson and two lead sheriff's detectives on the case, Linda Burton and William Blake; and Sgt. Robert Bullara and Maj. Gary Terry, who oversaw the investigation. Also named is Anthony Pellicano, hired by prosecutors as a tape expert.
In March 2001, Cohen filed a motion under the Hyde Amendment, a rarely used law that lets federal criminal defendants collect attorneys' fees from the government if the case against them was frivolous, vexatious or brought in bad faith.
In a surprise move, federal prosecutors conceded that the Hyde Amendment applied to the case, the first such concession since the law was passed in 1997. U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday awarded the Aisenbergs $2.9-million in legal fees, criticizing the investigation and calling parts of the indictment "trivial," "gratuitous" and "misleading."
Cohen's lawsuit says judges based decisions on prosecutors' and investigators' lies.
It also says the couple were defamed by then-Lt. Greg Brown, who was a spokesman for the Sheriff's Office and told a journalism class the Aisenbergs were responsible for their daughter's disappearance.
"This investigation was one big corrupt act," Cohen said, adding that prosecutors Kunz and Bedke were being unfairly protected by supervisors, rather than disciplined.
Cohen will have to convince a jury that officials operated outside of their scope of employment or acted with intentional misconduct, because the officials enjoy limited immunity against lawsuits.
